


i carry your heart

by wordbending



Category: Undertale (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Asriel Kills The Humans AU, Asriel becomes a cryptid, Chara Asriel Fusion, Child Death, Found Family, Implied Childhood Sexual Abuse, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Other
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-10
Updated: 2021-02-10
Packaged: 2021-03-16 16:26:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,664
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29335263
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wordbending/pseuds/wordbending
Summary: Long ago, there was a village named Elenai. Its people lived in peace and joy, until... in a single night...It was utterly destroyed.Deep in a forest rests the ruins of Elenai. It is said that nobody who seeks the ruins ever returns. It is said there is a monster that lives among the trees.It is said that children who enter the forest... will be eaten alive.
Relationships: Chara & Asriel Dreemurr & Frisk, Chara & Asriel Dreemurr & Human Souls, Chara/Asriel Dreemurr
Comments: 8
Kudos: 19





	i carry your heart

**Author's Note:**

> This fic has the death of a child and references to child abuse, physical abuse, and sexual abuse/rape. Please mind these warnings.

LONG AGO, THERE WAS A VILLAGE THE PEOPLE CALLED ELENAI, AND ITS PEOPLE LIVED IN PEACE AND JOY.

UNTIL, IN A SINGLE NIGHT...

IT WAS UTTERLY DESTROYED.

DEEP IN A FOREST RESTS THE RUINS OF ELENAI.

IT IS SAID THAT NOBODY WHO SEEKS THE RUINS EVER RETURNS.

IT IS SAID THERE IS A MONSTER WHO LIVES AMONG THE TREES.

IT IS SAID THAT CHILDREN WHO ENTER THE FOREST...

WILL BE EATEN ALIVE.

* * *

His paws were stained with blood, red smears on white fur. They shook as he stared at them, like vibrating strings - in his growing horror, magic pulsed through him with enough energy to power the cosmos. But the heart inside him was completely and utterly calm.

He was surrounded by bodies, bodies upon bodies upon bodies. They lay over top of one another, or in gruesome contortions on the ground, all of them burned as if by wildfires. Blood flowed from the bodies, pooling below his ankles as if gravitated towards him.

“Well, that was overkill,” said a voice in his head, a voice more familiar to him than even his own parents. “You didn’t have to kill _everyone.”_

“This isn’t funny,” he said to them, out loud. It wasn’t as if there was anyone to hear.

“No,” said the voice. “It’s not.”

“There were children there,” he said, his voice catching in his throat.

“There were,” said the voice, softly. “I’m sorry. You didn’t mean to.”

“Maybe,” he said. He wiped at his eyes, filled with the beginning of tears. “I don’t know.”

There was a sound from the bodies, and he turned to face the noise to see that something had stirred. It rose, slowly.

It was a human being, wearing a bloodied shirt. They stumbled as they stood up, holding onto a wound in their abdomen. Blood flowed between their fingers, and they looked up at him, eyes wide with fear.

He extended his paw, and a rainbow sword, with a wide, U-shaped hilt, appeared floating next to it. The human stumbled backwards at the sight, and he floated closer to them.

**♥ FIGHT MERCY**

* * *

She learned two things about the world, and she learned them early. The first was:

\- If you’re cute, people won’t hit you as hard.

So she put on dresses, in bright pastel colors, and she wore her hair in curls, and she put a ribbon in her hair that she never took off.

The second was:

\- People will still hit you.

When she learned this, she waited a long time. Maybe they’d get bored, she thought. Maybe if she ignored them, they’d go away. When they didn’t, she took a knife out of her kitchen drawer to protect herself from the people who wanted to hurt her.

It might as well have been a toy. They just hit her even harder. So she ran instead, far from home - her hair ruined, her dress tattered, but her ribbon untouched.

She didn’t cry when she entered the forest. She hadn’t heard any legends of monsters, or ruins, or death that awaited anyone who entered it. But she didn’t expect to come back out.

She’d wait for death instead. She could wait a long time, after all.

* * *

He stood, his robes and fur still covered with blood, on the top of Mt. Ebott, in front of the barrier that had separated monsters from the rest of the world for thousands of years. In his arms was a child’s body, the body of the only person he’d ever loved, and they were still talking to him despite having been dead for hours.

“Here we are,” they announced.

Inside his body pulsed incredible magic. Not a single soul, not six souls, but hundreds of souls. It was almost too powerful - it threatened to explode out of him, to recreate the universe at the slightest thought.

“Do it,” the voice inside his head said. “This is what we did all this for.”

He stood silently in front of the barrier, which hummed quietly. With a single touch, he could shatter it. With a single touch, he could free his people. With a single touch, he could fulfill everyone’s hopes and dreams for millenia - he’d be their savior.

He’d have everything. Except the only thing that mattered.

“No,” he said.

And he set the body down on the ground, gently laying it to rest in front of the barrier. He turned away, back towards the path he’d travelled up.

“No?!” the voice in his head shouted. “No?! What the _fuck,_ Asriel? ”

Asriel continued to silently trail the path down the mountain.

“Do you know how many people you just killed? Why did you... what was the _point?!_ ”

Asriel floated over vines, ducked under tree branches. The path was long, and unkempt, a path nobody - monster or human - was meant to travel up or down. If one didn’t know to look for it, they’d never find it.

“God damn you! Answer me, Asriel! I _died_ for this!”

And at that, Asriel laughed.

“Did you?” he asked. “Are you really dead?”

“I don’t know, why don’t you ask my _corpse?”_

Asriel shook his head.

“If you still don’t get it, I’ll never be able to explain it to you.”

* * *

She kept walking, but she didn’t know what she expected to find, or when she expected to stop. She supposed, if she thought about it, that she wanted her death to be quiet and peaceful. She’d find a clearing in the forest, the sunlight pouring onto the ground, and lay down, surrounded by flowers and butterflies. And then she’d wait.

What she wasn’t expecting to see was the ruins of a village, ancient wooden houses emerging from the ground like gravestones. Vines had overtaken them, and holes pockmarked every corner where the roofs hadn’t collapsed inwards. The wooden boards were burned and hollow, empty shells like the buildings they had once made up.

In the center of it all was a tree, or what had once been a tree. It was charred and black, and there wasn’t a single leaf on what passed for its branches. Below it, among its roots, was a sphere of black earth, like someone had incinerated the ground below in a perfect circle.

She stared out at the ruined village, and then she walked to the circle of burned earth, and then she sat down on it, on both knees.

She would die here.

* * *

Asriel stood above the bodies, gathered into a pile, men, women, and children. There had to have been a hundred of them, at least. He could still remember when some of them had drawn their strange gunpowder weapons at him, or taken makeshift clubs and sticks and threatened to simply beat him to death.

He’d only had one thought.

_I have to protect Chara._

That one thought, and magic had exploded out of him. Meteors had fallen from the sky in the shape of stars, tearing through the buildings and incinerating anyone they didn’t destroy on impact. It’d filled the tiny village with the sound of screams and burning flesh for a mile around.

Now there was nobody left. All that was left to do was wave his hand over the pile of bodies and set them ablaze, just like he’d seen his mother do so many times to the fireplace. Once again, there was the smell of burning flesh as the bodies were incinerated, columns of smoke rising high into the air.

The fire slowly spread, and soon it consumed the tree in the center of the village, the tree surrounded by golden flowers, and it burned those too, and then it burned the tree, and then the smoking wrecks of the houses burned with them, and then there was nothing but ash and dust.

* * *

It turned out, ironically, that she didn’t have to wait for long, because death came for her. It came silently, floating up behind her, not with a scythe, but with a sword raised at her throat.

“Why are you here?” it said.

“To die,” she answered, simply.

“You’re not like the others,” it said. She didn’t turn around to look at who was speaking.

“There are others?”

“There were."

She waited, silently, but the sword didn’t move, and the voice didn’t speak.

“Are you going to kill me?”

“No.”

“Are you going to hurt me?”

“No.”

Another pause.

“Why do you think I’d hurt you?” the voice asked.

At that, she couldn’t help it - she giggled. “Your sword, silly.”

“Oh. Right.”

She looked to her side as the sword dissipated, as if it hadn’t been there at all.

“Kids like you...” the voice said. “Shouldn’t be here. You should go home.”

“No.”

The owner of the voice sighed.

“Turn around.”

She did. When she did, she didn’t gasp in surprise, or fear. She only took in the sight of a monster, tall and wearing robes with a strange symbol, with long ears and longer horns. His eyes were tiny white pupils in an inky black void, and two curved sections of black fur on his cheeks cut into the white fur elsewhere on his body.

“Aren’t you scared?” he asked, and all she could think was: oh, he sounds like a kid. “Don’t you have a mom or dad?”

“They’re a lot scarier than you are,” she answered.

* * *

“With this much power, you could do anything,” said the voice in Asriel’s head, as he sits in the wreckage of the village. “Anything. You could reshape the universe in your image. You could make a world for only us.”

“I don’t want that,” Asriel responded.

“That’s the only thing I thought you wanted,” the voice responds, and then, softer, “That’s the only thing that I wanted. All these years.”

“These souls inside me...” Asriel said, raising a paw to his chest and placing it against it. Against his paw, he feels the pounding of hundreds of souls, like a tidal wave trying to break down a door. “I can’t use them like that. I didn’t kill them to use them like... like tools.”

The voice inside him is silent.

“And that’s why you...?”

Asriel shook his head.

“I told you. If you don’t understand, I can’t explain it to you.”

* * *

Something shifted in the monster’s expression, and when he spoke again, it’s almost with a different voice - everything about it, from its tone to its pitch, had completely changed. It sounded younger, but somehow older at the same time.

“Take me there,” it said. “Take me there and I’ll kill them all. Your parents, your tormentors... everyone who’s ever hurt you.”

She shook her head.

“No.”

“Ha,” it said. “You’re as bad as he is.”

“Who’s he?”

“Asriel,” it said. “He’s a stubborn old goat.”

“What about you?” she asked. “What’s _your_ name?”

The monster smiled. “I think it’s polite for a lady to offer her name first.”

“Oh. I'm Ndidi.”

The monster extended one arm behind itself, raised the other over its chest, and bowed, and she giggled.

“Greetings. I am Chara.”

* * *

It wasn’t long before someone came to find him. He expected as much - though he expected the military, not policemen in uniforms, shining flashlights on the burned village.

“I’ve never been fond of police,” Chara said, in his head.

“I’m not going to kill them,” Asriel responded.

“You wouldn’t be in this situation if you hadn’t let that human go,” Chara said with a mental shrug. “Besides, police aren’t people.”

“I’m still not going to kill them. I’m never going to kill anyone again.”

“If you don’t kill them,” Chara replied, firmly. “They’ll come back. They’ll keep coming back, over and over, and they’ll find us, and they’ll bring bigger and bigger guns until they finally kill us. Or, they’ll come back with bulldozers and wrecking balls, and they’ll tear this wreckage down, and we’ll have nowhere to go.”

Asriel made a noncommittal humming noise.

“I won’t kill them,” he said, and then he extended his hand, and his sword formed in it. “But that doesn’t mean I won’t hurt them.”

* * *

She didn’t go back home, and she didn’t wait to die. She stayed in the village with Asriel and Chara, and she planted new flowers, new trees. Asriel hunted food for her, even though she hated the idea of killing and eating animals, and slowly built her a home from the wood that was still usable.

Years passed like that, and she grew older and older - from a child to a teenager to an adult, and then older still, until her dark brown hair grayed. Asriel and Chara didn’t age at all, or at least, not physically.

One day, long into those many decades, she sat down on both knees, in the patch of golden flowers that she had grown where the circle of dead earth was. It was a struggle for her to lower herself to the ground.

Asriel approached her and sat down next to her, in the same position.

“What are you doing, Ndidi?” he asked, even though he knew exactly what she would say.

“Waiting.”

“For what?” he said, again knowing exactly what she would say.

“To die.”

He didn’t smile at her. He merely stared straight ahead.

“Mind if I join you?”

She turned to him and smiled softly.

“Of course you can.”

When he buried her, it was in front of the tree.

* * *

Nobody came back after the police showed up. Chara figured it was as simple as that nobody would believe the story that a monster had shown up and frightened them off - they’d probably just believe they’d been attacked by wolves, or had a shared hallucination. Even if they did believe it, nobody would have dared go back.

Asriel stayed there for decades. He could have left, if he’d wanted to. He could have gone anywhere - nothing would have been able to stop him. But he told Chara this was the home of the people he’d killed, the souls that still lived inside him. He needed to stay here. He didn’t deserve to go anywhere else.

Chara had been right, in one sense. This was everything he’d ever wanted - a world for just Chara and him, where only they existed. And yet, at the same time, it was what Chara might have called “hell.” Despite being closer to Chara than he’d ever imagined possible, he’d never felt more alone.

As the decades passed, he felt his mind slipping away from him, like two plates on a fault line. He couldn’t have imagined decades with Chara would feel like such an abyss.

And, worst of all, it wasn’t just Chara. The souls, it turned out, spoke. He heard their voices inside his head whenever he closed his eyes, whenever he slept. He heard their anger, their sorrow, the agony of the deaths he’d caused, the families he’d torn apart. It came to the point where he didn’t close his eyes at all, or sleep, because no matter how much time passed, he couldn’t stand it for even a single second.

He was immortal now too, so he couldn’t end his own life even if he wanted to. As a Boss Monster, as long as he never had biological children, he could never die of old age, and as someone containing this many souls, he could never be killed. Nothing was strong enough to kill him, not even himself.

And so he’d stay, he was sure, forever.

Or that was what he thought. Because one day, someone entered the village. It was a little girl, dark brown skin and dark brown hair in curls, a ribbon on her head. She entered the ruins calmly and quietly, and she sat down in the place where the bodies had laid, and she waited.

Her name was Ndidi.

* * *

More decades passed. Asriel felt lonelier than ever. He’d imagined, once upon a time, that being fused with Chara would be almost romantic - how much closer to someone could you be, after all, than sharing your thoughts with them?

The reality is that it was both too close and not close enough. Chara was like a solid wall, and they had been ever since he’d chosen not to shatter the barrier. The little parts of them that leaked out from between the concrete wall that lay between their minds lacked any of the fondness they’d once had for him, and he couldn’t help but feel that the truth he didn’t want to acknowledge was that they hated his guts.

When he’d been younger, before he’d even met Chara, he’d believed in the beauty of the surface - he’d believed in fairy tales, pots of gold at the rainbow’s end, and roses kissed with dew. Now he only saw the ugly truth behind it all, and he understood, at last, why Chara had so hated humanity, why they had never wanted to go home.

Ndidi hadn’t changed that. If anything, she had made these feelings stronger. She was innocent, and kind, and so he’d kept her safe and protected from the world outside these ruins. But all she’d told him was that there are people out there who wanted to hurt her. And, from the way Chara had reacted to what she’d said, he could tell there were people who once wanted to hurt Chara the same way, even if they were long dead now.

How could he imagine there was beauty on the surface knowing that? How could he ever go and break the barrier, knowing that he’d be bringing his people into a world so horrible? He almost preferred it this way, to hide away in these ruins, away from the rest of the surface world.

Of course, it’d end up, once again, finding him.

* * *

They always tackled things headfirst, and often, they didn’t mean that metaphorically. When people had told them they were a boy or a girl, they’d told them all that they weren’t - they were both. When people tried to bully them, they beat their bullies up first. When their parents tried to tell them how to be a good child, they fought twice as hard to be a so-called “bad one.”

They were a wild child. Uncontrollable. Violent. A tried and true troublemaker. So it wasn’t long before they were taken out of public school and put in a school meant to make a good, obedient student out of them.

They broke out in two days, and they broke everyone else out too. They became, in their own way, a champion for the children of their city, homeless, queer, or otherwise “undesirable.” They fought off anyone who would even think of hurting them, and when the police tried to arrest them, it was the police that often ended up as the ones in handcuffs.

So, of course, when they heard the legend about the monster in the forest that ate children, they’d taken it as a challenge. They’d said goodbye to their little makeshift crew, and they’d gone into the forest, eager to prove themselves once again.

* * *

A second child came. They looked so different from Ndidi, with their paler skin, and sharper eyes. They lacked her calm collectedness - instead, they marched out of the forest and towards the ruins with their chin held high, an orange bandanna with a drawing of abdominal muscles on it wrapped around their mouth, orange gloves on their hands.

When they reached the center of the ruined village, they stood under the shadow of the tree and shouted, “I know you’re here, monster! You’re never gonna eat another child again - not when I beat you! I challenge you to a fight!”

“You’re going to fight me with your bare hands?” Asriel called out, emerging from where he’d been watching them.

“Of course! I can take on anyone!”

Asriel smiled, and then he disappeared from where he’d been standing. He couldn’t help but be a little satisfied to see the surprise on the child’s face as he moved faster than sight, until he was standing right behind them, looking down on them. He didn’t even form his sword - he just hit them on the skull with the edge of his hand, making them stumble and fall onto their front.

They turned around, scrambling to their feet, and looked up at him, and he didn’t see any fear at all in their eyes. Their bandanna had fallen loose, and he could see their gritted teeth.

“If you’re gonna eat me, do it,” they spat.

“What?” he said. “I don’t eat people.”

He wiped his paw on the side of his robe and held it out towards them.

“Here. Take my hand. My name is Asriel - and I’m not going to hurt you. Uh, I mean, besides hitting you on the head. I promise.”

They looked up at him, still looking furious at him for having bested them, and he couldn’t help but smile. They reminded him a lot of Chara, actually, a thought that he felt Chara instantly resent.

“Eun-yeong,” they said, reaching up and taking his paw. Asriel’s smile widened as they rose up to their feet.

“Did you really...”

They stood up fully, and with no warning, they reached their arm back and swung it forward in a practiced rush of motion. Asriel had no time to react before he felt as their gloved hand rocketed into his stomach with force that shouldn’t have been possible for someone their age.

It had no effect on him at all. Instead, Eun-yeong yelped and shook their hand as if they’d just punched a brick wall.

“Please don’t hit me,” Asriel sighed.

“What?! Nobody’s ever...” They looked down at their hand in amazement. “Nobody’s ever survived my Deadly Five-Finger Sucker’s Fist!”

“Oh my god,” Chara said, out loud.

“Look, um, Eun-Yeong...” Asriel said, in his own voice. “I think you should really go home.”

“Never!” they shouted, glaring at him. “I’m not goin’ anywhere until I beat you in a fight and every kid’s safe!”

Asriel rubbed his temple. “OK. Fine. How about this then? I’ll, uh, train you. And once you can beat me, then you have to go home.”

He watched as Eun-Yeong’s expressions changed, from anger to curiosity to an eager grin... and then they stared at him, serious and determined.

“OK, _sensei,”_ they said, bowing. “I accept.”

Chara tried not to snicker.

* * *

Asriel expected Eun-Yeong to stay with him for a week, at most. It was obvious to anyone who looked, or would have been obvious if there was anyone that could look, that Asriel far outclassed them even without a single weapon. Asriel was faster and stronger than they were - he easily dodged out of the way of every single punch they threw, and if he so much as lightly pushed them, they were as good as knocked out.

Eun-Yeong did not stay with him for a week. They stayed with him for years.

They were nothing like Ndidi, it turned out. For one thing, there hadn’t been a single, solitary day where Ndidi had left the ruins for any reason. It had become, in effect, her entire world. He’d always find her in the morning, sleeping in the bed of golden flowers peacefully, and even in the rare times she went elsewhere, she never did it without staying right at his side, all the way until she was far too old to need someone to watch over her.

Eun-Yeong disappeared from the ruins in three weeks, and didn’t even leave the courtesy of a note. Asriel went off hunting to find food for them, and when he came back, they were just gone, without a trace.

He should have assumed they’d finally become bored of trying to fight him and gone back to the city. Instead, he panicked. He searched every one of the ruined buildings in case they’d gone exploring in them and hurt themselves or become buried under rubble, and then he expanded his search outwards to the forest surrounding the ruins. He kept calling their name, and he searched until the sun rose and then fell again, and still, he found nothing, not even a footprint.

He reached the edge of the forest, and in the distance from it, miles away, he could see the city. He thought about going into it, floating straight in, and finding what had happened to Eun-Yeong at any cost. He knew he could never do that, in reality - if he was to be found, he’d have to hurt people again, and he would never be able to live with himself if anyone else died because of him.

He took a deep breath and turned around, floating back through the trees and back towards the ruins. He told himself that they had to be safe, that they, above all other people, could take care of themselves. There was no chance that they were somewhere, alone, crying out for help. There was no chance that they had gone to the city only to be arrested, or worse.

He told himself that, over and over. He’d only known them for three weeks, after all. What did he have to be upset about, if they wanted to leave?

When he finally did emerge from the forest into the ruins, though, he was surprised to find himself tackled hard by something small and brawny. It was Eun-Yeong, of course, but they were hugging him tightly. They’d never done that before.

He bit back how he wanted nothing more than to yell at them for worrying him, and said instead, “What’s wrong? Where’d you go?”

They broke the hug, and they backed away and smiled at him, and Chara could instantly tell something _was_ wrong, even if they couldn’t tell what. Chara was better at knowing when a smile was fake than anyone.

“Nothin’, _sensei!_ I just took a walk.”

Asriel narrowed his eyes, and he felt a prick of anger from Chara as well.

“You had me worried sick,” he said. “You can’t just...”

“What are you, my dad?” they scoffed. “Come on, I can take care of myself.”

“No... I mean... I know _that,_ but.” He sighed and tried not to roll his eyes. “Look. Next time, just tell me when you want to leave.”

They shrugged _._

“Whatever.” Eun-Yeong turned around and started to walk off. “There ain’t gonna be a next time, so don’t worry about it.”

Asriel found himself glaring again, and he felt, inside of himself, Chara just as frustrated as he was. They’d both been worried so much about them, and now they were having this _attitude_ with him? He was just trying to find out what had happened and they were acting like he was their babysitter?

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means leave me alone!” Eun-Yeong shouted, whipping back around. “I said I can take care of _myself!_ ”

Asriel stared in shocked silence, and seemingly satisfied, Eun-Yeong walked away.

“Fight me then!” Asriel shouted to their retreating back.

Eun-Yeong stopped and turned around.

“Fight me!” Asriel repeated. “Prove you’ve got what it takes to survive!”

For a long moment, Eun-Yeong did nothing.

And then they grinned.

* * *

It was the last time Eun-Yeong disappeared. But eventually, as they sat in the house that had once belonged to Ndidi, Eun-Yeong devouring a rabbit that Asriel had cooked for them, Asriel finally decided it was time to ask them the question that had been on his mind ever since.

“How old are you again?”

Eun-Yeong swallowed. “Eighteen. I think. Why?”

“Well, I mean, if you’re that old, you can do whatever you want now. Right?”

They shook their head. “Nuh-uh. I mean, that’s what little kids think. How old’re _you?_ ”

“I’ve lost track,” he answered, honestly. “But... you don’t have to worry about your parents when you’re eighteen, right? You can live on your own. I mean, what about your gang?”

They tilted their head back as they seemed to consider this. “They’re tough, like their _sensei._ They’ll be OK!”

Asriel felt it before it happened - the shift in his mind as Chara’s thoughts intruded on his. He let it happen, let them speak.

“Tell it to me straight,” they said, and Eun-Yeong looked at them, not even slightly alarmed at the change in Asriel’s voice. “Something happened back then. When you left. Is there something you’re not telling us?”

“What’d’ya mean?”

“You went to the city. I know you did. Is there a reason you don’t want to go back?”

Eun-Yeong sat there, for a long moment, not eating, not answering, just staring straight ahead at the broken, makeshift wall of the house where they now lived.

“Why would I wanna go home?” they said, and they turned back towards Asriel with a grin. “I still haven’t beat you yet!”

* * *

They never stopped fighting. They never gave in. Even as the years became, once again, decades. Even as their body began to fall apart, even as they could no longer swing a fist or even stand. Even as Asriel couldn’t care for them anymore, even as their ravaged body was eaten away from the inside out.

They never beat him, but they never stopped fighting.

And they never told him why, in all that time, they didn’t want to go back home.

* * *

She held her chin up high, despite everyone who wanted her to keep her chin low. She was at the age when she got unwelcome stares, or worse, and she knew what they wanted. They wanted her to sink herself low, to bury herself in the muck until she couldn’t pull herself free. She refused to.

They - her fellow students, usually, but not always - wanted her to stop being a child, to grow up too fast. She refused to.

So they made her.

She ran. She ran far away, still in her ballerina uniform, still in her ballet slippers. She refused to cry as she ran into the forest, because she knew that there was nowhere else to run. She’d heard the legends of the monster that lived in the forest and devoured children whole, and the way she felt twisted inside-out, she wanted nothing more than to be eaten alive, just like that.

* * *

This time, it was Asriel who was surprised. He didn’t hear the footsteps come up behind him as he sat quietly in the golden flowers Ndidi had once planted, until the owner of the footsteps spoke, her voice as firm as steel.

“Are you the monster?” she said.

Asriel didn’t turn around.

“I’m _a_ monster,” he said.

“You eat children, right?”

“I’ve been told that.”

He heard a _thump,_ and he turned around to see she’d fallen to her knees. She sat there, back ramrod straight, chin held high. He was reminded of Eun-Yeong, although they couldn’t look further apart, with the girl’s twig-like limbs, her large eyes, her nearly solid black skin covered in splotches of bright white, like paint.

“Kill me. Eat me. I don’t care.”

“I’m not going to kill you, or eat you.”

“Why?!” she demanded, raising a hand to her chest. “You kill people, don’t you? You eat kids, don’t you? What makes me any different?!”

“I don’t eat children,” he said.

“Everyone eats children,” she spat, as if this was an obvious fact, and he didn’t understand at all. “That’s all everyone wants. To devour us and _spit us out!_ ”

He said nothing. He just continued to stare at her. She didn’t look that much older than Chara, but she was already so cynical. He wondered how she was like the others, how she’d been hurt in such a way that she’d seek him out just to die.

“What’s your name?” he said, as gently as possible.

“Monsters in the forest steal names,” she replied.

“That’s _fairies,”_ Chara replied for him. “Do we look like a fairy?”

At that, she looked puzzled. “We?”

“Forget it,” Asriel cut in. He turned away from her, looking at her over his shoulder. “It’s late and you’re probably starving. I’m going to find you a meal. Get some rest - there’s no bed, but you can lay wherever you want.”

“I refuse,” she said, chin still held just as high. “I’d rather die.”

“I can’t stop you from starving to death if that’s what you want,” Asriel sighed. “But I’d prefer you didn’t. I’ll be back soon.”

And he floated away, the girl saying nothing.

* * *

By the time he returned, she had fallen onto the ground, asleep. He took one of the makeshift blankets he’d made for Ndidi and Eun-Yeong by tying together vines and laid it over her, and he sat there, and he waited.

When she woke up, she threw the blanket off herself and stared incredulously at him as he presented a dead fish to her.

“I’m a vegetarian,” she said.

“Oh,” he replied, once Chara informed him what that was. "Well, can't you, uh, make an exception?"

She glared at him.

"Don't you have any apple trees? Potatoes? Corn?"

"I don't... think so?"

She grimaced, looking less angry at him than at the world itself. She curled inwards and rested her head on her knees.

"Great. So I'll starve to death."

Asriel frowned down at her. He didn’t really know what he was supposed to do. It wasn’t as if he had seeds to plant, or as if he could traipse down to the nearby city to pick up groceries. He couldn’t leave her to die, and he couldn’t force her to eat, so...

“You won’t starve to death.”

She looked up at him, and he held out his paw, palm-up. In the center of his palm, sparkling lights of energy, like bullet patterns, began to orbit around each other in the shape of a sphere made of rings, not unlike an atom. As easily as thinking, he reshaped the sphere, and the rings spun faster and faster and faster until they became a blur, until they shone so brightly that no shape could be made out at all.

And then it stopped, and in his palm was an apple, as green as the grass beneath their feet.

“What?” said the girl, her voice stunned into near-silence. “How?”

“I wasn’t going to let you die,” he said, as if that passed for an explanation.

He held out the apple towards her, and she took it, staring at it, rotating it in her hand before she finally reached out with her mouth and took a bite of it. There was a loud _crunch_ as she broke the skin, and juices from the apple spilled down her chin.

“It’s good,” she admitted.

“Er. Thanks,” he replied.

“Can you do it again?”

He felt, inside him, the empty space of the soul he had used up. Creating life, even simple life, didn’t come easily - much less life from seemingly nothing.

“I’d prefer not to.”

“Then... we should take the seeds out and plant more,” she said, after taking another bite. “We can grow apple trees, and you won’t have to make any more.”

He nodded. She kept eating the apple, and when she was done, she took the seeds out. He used his magic to clear out space in the grass, away from the ruins, and she planted the seeds from the apple into the soft soil.

As she planted, Chara spoke to him.

“I thought you said you wouldn’t use them as tools.”

“I used them to save a life,” he replied. “It’s not the same thing.”

* * *

The girl trusted him less than the children that had come before her, that much was obvious. Not only did she not give him her name, she refused to let him anywhere near her, and she refused to speak to him about her past. He supposed that was all fair enough - Chara was much the same way.

He didn’t try to make her leave or go home, just like the other children. He simply helped her whenever she needed help growing her seeds or collecting water, and he provided her with more seeds - pears, peaches, corn, and potatoes among them. Soon enough, she had a garden and an orchard, enough to take care of herself without him having to expend the power of the souls inside him to feed her.

That wasn’t the only thing she did either. She seemed clearly unsatisfied with the state of where she lived, so she worked to fix it. She repaired the holes in the house that he’d built for Ndidi, and she even managed to repair the roof. She built a bed out of the wooden boards that were still salvageable, although they had to make the mattress out of hay. She even built an outhouse.

He thought, as the decades passed, she might become happier - happy to live with him, happy to be safe. But, just like with the other children - just like with Chara - she became more distant instead, like there was a hole in her heart that nothing would fill.

“I thought I’d be a mother,” she said once, thirty-three years after she’d met him, surprising him as they picked apples in the orchard. “I thought I’d grow up and get married and have children, and that would make me happy.”

He thought over his response carefully, wondering what he should say. Perhaps “what happened?” or “is that still what you want?” or even, from another part of himself, “I wanted that too, once.” Instead, he decided it was best that he keep silent.

“That’s why I fell in love,” she continued, as she picked apples. “Or why I thought I did.”

He surprised himself when he replied, automatically, and he realized it was because Chara had spoken for him.

“But you were just another apple, not yet ripe.”

She nodded and set another apple in her basket.

“You know, speaking of apples, they always say ‘one bad apple,’” Chara continued. “But the full expression is ‘one bad apple spoils the broth.’”

“So you understand then.”

Chara smiled. “You’re in good company.”

* * *

He liked learning. He took to books not like a sponge takes to water, but like the earth takes to the sun. He studied the world. He researched everything he could, from the smallest insect to the mathematics of the universe, as if with enough effort, enough examination, he could crack open the watchmaker’s watch. Even when people told him the largest answers he sought could never be found, he only searched that much harder.

It was that hunger for knowledge that brought him to the forest. Everyone knew the legends - children that entered the forest never returned, supposedly because of the monster in there that ate children alive. He believed the legends were true in the same way he believed in ghosts, or mermaids, or gods. Even if they weren’t true, the investigation into them was as useful as if they were.

He took his notebook and his wheelchair and he went between the trees, and the rest of the world never saw him again.

* * *

It had been sixty-five years since the girl had met him, the girl who still hadn’t told him her name, when a boy came out of the forest. He was the youngest Asriel had seen yet, and the smallest, especially with his huge, cloudy glasses and bigger wheelchair, and his pale skin made him look almost deathly. And yet he possessed Eun-Yeong’s bravado as he rolled into the clearing, penciling notes and sketches in his notebook.

He hadn’t noticed Asriel or the girl yet, mostly because they were both peeking quietly around the corner of a building.

“Should we say... you know, hello?” Asriel asked. “Maybe they just got lost.”

“Oh, absolutely not. You’ll scare the daylights out of them,” the girl responded. “Let me do it.”

And she stood and hobbled around the corner, towards the boy in the wheelchair, before Asriel could say a word in edgewise. The boy turned and then backed away, surprised at the sight of the old woman approaching him.

“Don’t be frightened,” she said. “There’s nothing to be scared of.”

“You don’t... look much like a monster, ma’am,” said the boy. “Do you eat people?”

She didn’t laugh. In a completely flat tone, she said, “Perhaps.”

“I heard there was a monster out here that looked like a two-legged goat man. There’s been rumors about it for hundreds of years, but no confirmed sightings. You haven’t seen anything like that, have you?”

“A goat man? Well...” She cupped her chin. “Hard to say. It’s always been just me and my farm out here. I have an orchard too.”

“Really? Wherever do you get your seeds?” He looked down at her raggedy old dress, once white but long blackened by soot. “No offense, but you don’t look like you spend a lot of time in the city. Do you live in the forest?”

“That’s right. I haven’t seen the city in _ever_ so long,” she said. Asriel could feel Chara grinning. The girl bent down. “Come closer, child, and I’ll tell you my secret.”

He did. In the near-silence of the ruins, Asriel could just barely hear them as they whispered to each other.

“Are you a ghost?” the boy asked.

“I...” she said, with a very long pause. “Am... a...”

The boy leaned closer with every word.

“Ballerina.”

The boy laughed.

“Wait,” he said. “Really?”

“And you want to know where I get my seeds?”

He nodded.

“The goat man makes them for me,” she said.

At those words, the boy once again didn’t seem startled, or scared. Despite all these legends that were apparently being told about a goat man who eats children, he almost seemed relieved.

“The goat man’s real?” he said. The girl nodded, and he whispered excitedly, “Can I see him?”

“Of course you can,” she replied, and Asriel took that as his cue. He emerged from the building and floated over towards the boy, who grinned and rolled his way towards him. When they finally met at the front, the boy eagerly stuck out his hand.

“Don’t call me the goat man, please,” he said with a smile, extending his paw and shaking his hand. “My name is Asriel.”

“Percy,” said the boy.

* * *

Everything completely changed with Percy. If the unnamed girl kept her distance from Asriel, even after all those decades together, it only took five minutes for her to treat Percy as if he was her own child. She showed him everything she could, the little possessions they had, and he riddled her with question after question about it, about her life living in these ruins.

She tried to teach him everything she knew, but it turned out he knew almost everything, so there wasn’t much for him to learn. Even Chara was shocked at how much he knew about math, science, astrology, and history. But there were things, after all, that even he didn’t know, so the three of them taught him those. Asriel taught him about the history of his kind, and Chara taught him about literature, and the girl with no name taught him how to dance.

What struck Percy’s curiosity even more, however, was what came before - what happened to this place? Did Asriel destroy this town? What happened to all the other children who had disappeared?

As she had shown him around, he had become especially curious about a wooden chest in the makeshift house that, miraculously, was not burned. She told him to ask Asriel about it, and all those questions, and Asriel told him not to ask him about any of those things again. He had his secrets, after all.

Percy turned out to be especially curious about magic, but Asriel wouldn’t show him it either.

“Every time I use magic, it costs me something more valuable than gold,” he had explained to him.

Percy had nodded and scribbled in his notebook.

“Valuable to you?” he asked. “Like your locket?”

“Not like this locket,” he answered, clutching the locket in his paw. “It’s not something I own. It’s something that I took from someone else, and can never give back.”

Percy nodded again. He didn’t ask any more questions about it after that.

* * *

Years passed, as they always did, and the girl with no name grew old, as Asriel always knew she would. Percy was around fifteen when the girl couldn’t teach him to dance anymore, and soon after, she climbed into the bed and waited for death to come.

For the second time in his life, Asriel sat by the edge of someone’s bed and wished desperately for them not to die.

“Please,” he said, holding her dark hand in his white paw. It was one of the only times in her life she’d ever let him touch her. “Please just tell me your name.”

“Is it really important?” she said with a smile. “I told you: monsters in the forest steal names.”

“Maybe I want to steal it,” he said, trying to smile back. “Maybe I want to steal it so I won’t forget it.”

She laughed at that.

“It’s Lunaria,” she said. “Take care of it, won’t you? It’s the last thing I had.”

“That’s not true,” he said. “You have Percy.”

“Oh, Asriel,” Lunaria replied. “You know Percy doesn’t belong to anyone.”

* * *

He found Percy outside the house, sobbing, as rain pelted down upon the roof of their house, upon his head. Asriel had never heard him cry at all, much less so hard. None of the children he’d known had cried so hard, and Chara had stopped crying a long time ago, but that wasn’t why he stood there in silence. He stood there, not speaking, because he felt like he was about to tear in two.

“Let me show you something,” he finally told Percy after a long moment, and Percy nodded and wiped his eyes. Asriel went back into the house, and picked up the chest Percy had been so curious about, and he took it back outside. Focusing on his own magic, he waved his paw and, in a small circle around where the two of them were standing, the rain stopped.

He opened the chest. Percy looked into it - it was a simple wooden chest, without any decorations, covering, or cushioning. On the bottom of it were three sets of objects - a red ribbon and a knife, a bandanna covered in a drawing of abdominal muscles alongside a pair of gloves, and a tutu along with a pair of ballet slippers.

He motioned to the ribbon and the knife.

“These belonged to the first child who came here. Her name was Ndidi, and she was the most kind, patient girl I’ve ever met. She was nothing but gentle, but she told me people hit her. She tried to protect herself, with this knife, but... she couldn’t.”

He motioned to the bandanna and the gloves.

“These belonged to Eun-Yeong, the second child who came here. They tried to fight me - they spent their whole life here trying to fight me, even though they could never win. They told me they had a gang of kids they watched over - they called themselves their _sensei._ But even though they were brave, they never told me what they were afraid of most.”

And he motioned to the tutu and the ballet slippers.

“And these belonged to...” He took a breath. “To Lunaria. Someone betrayed her in the worst possible way, and she ran, and she found me. But she didn’t trust me even with her name, almost to the end. She refused to let anyone tell her to do anything.”

And then he raised his paw from the chest to his chest.

“And, in here, there are a hundred more just like them. I can hear their names. I can hear how much they suffer. Because...” he said. “Because I did burn down this village. Because I killed everyone here, and absorbed their souls into myself. _That’s_ where my magic comes from.”

He stared at Percy, who stared back at him.

“Do you understand what I’m saying? I’m a murderer. Do you think Ndidi would be happy if she had known I was a killer? Do you think Eun-Yeong, who wanted to fight me because they _thought_ I hurt people, would have ever looked at me without hatred in their eyes? And Lunaria? She never would have accepted it. Never.”

His gaze fell downwards.

“What about you?”

“Why are you telling me this?” Percy said, gently.

He didn’t know, but the words burst out of him anyway, like he couldn’t hold them back even if he’d tried.

“Because... because you deserve to know! Because I can’t forgive _myself!_ Because... because...”

He sobbed, openly, for the first time in hundreds of years.

“Because if I have to watch you die too, I don’t know what I’m going to do. I can’t put these pieces of you in a box. I can’t bury you. I just can’t.”

Percy said nothing for a long, long moment.

“Then I’ll leave.”

Asriel didn’t respond.

“That’s what you want, isn’t it? It’s fine. I don’t mind. There’s a lot out there I can learn.”

“If you leave,” Asriel said, his voice quiet but firm. “If you leave, don’t come back. Promise.”

“I promise,” he said.

Asriel heard as the wheels of his wheelchair turned back and rolled through the grass, as the returning rain pelted hard against his head.

Asriel didn’t watch him go.

* * *

It was only an hour later that Asriel and Chara had become calm enough to begin to panic. They’d let Percy go alone, into the rain, into the forest, in the darkness, and Chara’s voice was screaming at themselves for it - _idiot, idiot, idiot!_

He could still be out there, they thought. He could still be out there, not far away - all they had to do was find him. They’d apologize and they’d bring him back and they’d take care of him.

The rain was coming down harder than ever, they thought as they floated through the trees. He could have become lost. His wheelchair could have broken or caught in the mud. Anything could have happened, and it’d be their fault, their _stupid_ fault. They wanted to tear down this entire fucking forest all at once, if it meant they’d find him.

And they did. They came into a clearing, and their heart rushed into their chest when they saw Percy’s wheelchair there, right in front of them.

And there was Percy, floating in the nearby river, upside-down.

They moved faster than lightning to him, and they bent down with trembling hands and turned him over, lifting him out of the murky brown water. They wiped his face, but his lips were blue, and his blue eyes were wide and empty without his glasses. No breath came into his lungs.

They were too late.

“No,” Chara said, their voice hard. “No, it’s not too late. It’s not. We can fix this.”

“I can’t,” Asriel responded, voice choked with grief. “I can’t.”

“You said it was fine to save a life! If you can’t use them for this, then what are they even good for?!”

“I don’t know!” he shouted back.

“ _Then do it!”_

Asriel swallowed, and then he focused on the souls within him, focused hard. He didn’t know what he was doing, not even slightly, but he tried to will life back into Percy’s body, tried with everything he had. It couldn’t be that different than creating an apple, not really.

But nothing happened at all. Percy did not stir.

“No, no, no,” he wailed. Two of them in one night, and worse, this time he’d as good as killed him. He was such an idiot. And now there was nothing would take back what he’d done.

Nothing.

Nothing...?

His paws shook as he looked down at Percy’s body, held in them. His paws shook, and he was filled with one thought, and one thought only.

_Take it back._

And the world shattered.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to my friends (and girlfriend) for reading this and giving feedback on it.


End file.
